A gutn teg, a gutn yahr, Adon Fleyshfresser. Voos machtste? You don’t look so great. What’s up?
You seem excited, Adon Fleyshfresser. What’s this? Du hob mir im Warshau? You’ve got me, eh? OK, let’s hear it, Mr. Fleyshfresser. Tuchus afn tish!
I see. Since Vitamin B12 has been shown to be essential to human health, and since you say I can’t get Vitamin B12 on my vegan diet, therefore the vegan diet is unhealthy for the human, and Baruch Ben-Zev’s firm conviction that Judaism is a vegan religion, as evidenced by G-d’s statements in B’rasheet (Genesis) 1:29 on what Man is permitted to eat, is incorrect. And the end result is, you are right, I am wrong, and you can go on eating meat, and feeling like you are an observant Jew. So you really think you have Ben-Zev in Warsaw on this one, eh?
Well, Mr. Fleyshfresser, not so fast. Haven’t you heard of those many vegetarian Hindus, some of them vegan, who lived to be over a hundred. If B12 (and the amino acid carnatine, found in meat) are so essential to human health, how did these men achieve their fivescore years, and without evident neurological damage?
Ah, but wait, Ben-Zev, you say. When Hindus came to Britain, and maintained a vegan diet, they did start suffering from Vitamin B12 deficiencies. So there.
But, Mr. Fleyshfresser, be not so sure. You’re talking of well-washed industrial food, not the village greens that the Hindu vegan would have eaten in his native land. Evidentally, the amount of B12 naturally occuring from insect deposits on the produce, as well as normal bacterial contamination from small plot gardens, and cold-water washing of such produce, provided enough natural B12 to prevent those conditions that became manifest once these individual removed to Britain, and other western cultures. So, under pre-industrial conditions, vegans could indeed have obtained their B12 from eating a purely vegan diet, providing it was grown and processed under those “primitive” conditions.
Don’t look so downtrodden, Adon Fleyshfresser. You may get yet another chance to “hob mir in Warshau.” — Baruch Ben-Zev
